All Things Digital

OK, I like Twitter a lot, but what is up with all this tech news coverage of its outages?

With the Twitter service being glitchy all weekend, for example, the jump-to-the-next-big-thing champ Robert Scoble wrote another piece yesterday smacking his old amour and praising his new love: FriendFeed.

You know, the new pretty young thing in Silicon Valley (ex-Googlers involved make it hotter still!).

You don’t know?

Neither does most of the human race, in truth, which is just getting around to noticing Facebook and maybe, just maybe, figuring out how to properly use a SuperPoke (my advice: never ever!).

And, while Twitter is amazing in many ways, its tech glitches don’t deserve this level of emergency alarms.

But that has not stopped the echo chamber of Silicon Valley from making a lot of really noisy noise about the indignity of it all.

Isn’t there a recent Sarah Lacy interview with some random Web 2.0 player they could egregiously overreact to instead?

In a weird way, though, this reminds me of the outrage when AOL (TWX) went down for 19 hours in August of 1996. (To date myself, I was actually at AOL HQ in Virginia at that very time with CEO Steve Case, working on my first book.)

At the time, AOL’s 6.3 million users had their first collective digital nervous breakdown and the outage resulted in national headlines–as well as later governmental investigations–across the nation.

“If this (outage) is a sign that AOL can’t handle its growth, that’s a very bad message for the professionals that use it,” Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications, said ominously to CNN at the time.

Now, 6.3 million users over a decade ago in today’s terms is a lot more in comparison to Twitter’s current users.

But the difference: Today, one single person like Scoble can tweet louder than millions can complain and it sounds like it is exactly the same thing.

I could not agree more with both Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and Valleywag’s Owen Thomas, an unlikely and motley trio we three, when I say: Leave Sarah Lacy alone.

OK, the interview she did with Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW on Sunday was a little silly at times and she probably annoyed people when she flacked her new book. (Full disclosure: I have written two books, so I can relate to the unfortunate impulse to do so.)

But to make such a big hairy deal in blogs and on Twitters seems a bit of overkill, doesn’t it?

Even including a wee bit too much girly hair-twirling by Lacy into the equation (which looked like simple nervousness to me), I just don’t get the uproar.

If Britney Spears had mounted a mighty steed and ridden naked down Hollywood Boulevard, trampling cute little bunnies as she went–it could happen!–it would not engender the level of vituperative online bloviating that the encounter of Lacy and Zuckerberg did.

Were there no other pointless blogging debates to be had yesterday? Aren’t there indignant Digg-for-sale stories to chew over? Wasn’t there a good open-source kerfuffle to get into angry exchanges about? Didn’t Robert Scoble do something that we can endlessly argue between and amongst ourselves?

I guess not and that’s too bad.

Arrington got it exactly right (except in singling out only journalists for the Lacy-bashing, since it was, well, everyone piling on), when he wrote:

“Perhaps they just got caught up in the fun of a witch burning. But whatever drove them to write those articles, it certainly wasn’t journalism. Nor was it professional. And, worst of all, it wasn’t accurate.”

And Thomas made the most salient point of who should have been the focus of the interview, when he wrote:

“I agree with the popular take on Sarah Lacy’s Zuckerberg interview at SXSW to this degree: The audience was revolting. Lacy threw an unbecomingly petulant tantrum onstage. But the Twitter reaction was equally self-indulgent. The debates over her performance obscured the man who should have been under the microscope: Mark Zuckerberg.”

Well, exactly.

I am, in fact, probably going to be interviewing Zuckerberg onstage at our upcoming D: All Things Digital conference in late May. I hope it goes well, but you never know.

But here’s an offer: If everyone promises to stop needlessly pummeling Lacy for her SXSW interview, I’ll consider twirling Zuckerberg’s hair during my interview with him.

Twitter that.

Also, here’s the video of the Lacy-Zuckerberg interview, so you can make your own judgment:

In the second of three discussions with Yahoo Finance’s Tech Ticker’s Sarah Lacy (the first was on politics in Silicon Valley), we talk about the management issues at Facebook.

BoomTown broke the news recently about the departure of longtime top exec Owen Van Natta at the hot social-networking site. I also reported on the start-up’s search for a No. 2 exec to back up Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and made some suggestions about possible candidates for the job.

Here’s my talk with Lacy about Facebook management changes:

As you can see from this video, BoomTown should stick to poking at Yahoo’s business plans, rather than talking to its very sharp Sarah Lacy of Yahoo Finance’s new Tech Ticker site.

Some material from AllThingsD appears on Tech Ticker from time to time, linking back to our site. And BoomTown was invited to talk about various topics last week with Lacy, including in this post and video about politics in Silicon Valley.

In the piece, Lacy and I discuss the candidates, as well as issues like ubiquitous broadband access (a critical issue about which I have long maintained the federal government has dropped the ball on spearheading the development of, as it has in the past with other important issues such as the universal telephone service or the federal highway system).

While I am not “longing” for former Vice President Al Gore, as the Tech Ticker post noted, it is still true that he is the most techie of any politician in recent memory.

I Obamapolize, but it’s true! (I also Obamapologize for my weird hair and lack of makeup, but I never appear on camera in BoomTown, so I am not going to when visiting Sunnyvale, Calif.)

Also below it is the hour-plus interview Walt Mossberg and I did with Sen. John McCain last May at our fifth D: All Things Digital conference, at a time when he was considered the longest of long shots for the Republican presidential nomination.

So much for predictions!